Modelling Human and Artificial Entities for Cyber-Physical Production and Human Systems Cooperation

To successfully tackle the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) paradigm, automation technologies must be seen and used to further enhance, complement and/or augment the human’s capabilities rather than replacing human competences. Cyber-Physical Production and Human Systems (CPPHS) acknowledge human presence, behaviours, creativity and skills, considering human beings as inherent elements of manufacturing control systems. Nevertheless, to empower industrial applications of CPPHS, cooperation is necessary to deal with complex interactions, appropriate and context-aware entity abstractions, to define and implement communication protocols and interfaces. This paper focuses on the CPPHS Concept Definition Phase by proposing a common entity abstraction that can be instantiated to model human and artificial entities. Our purpose is to offer an entity model in which cooperation becomes natural because it is rooted in the entity’s design and implementation. This work is inspired by the fact that in most of the literature reviewed on CPPHS, there are few details on the design of digital entity representation and their functionalities, with an emphasis on cooperation between such heterogeneous human entities. Although this paper focuses on the conceptual definition phase, this phase is extremely relevant to build effective cooperation within CPPHS, starting with modelling their constituent elements.